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XServe RAID Finally Makes An Entrance

Posted by Hemos on from the growing-up-fruity dept.

Currawong writes "Apple's very delayed 3U XServe RAID box has quietly appeared on their web site with details. Most interesting being that it uses ATA100 drives, rather than the usual SCSI, making it a bargain at US$10,999 for 2.52TB, especially compared to similar devices that cost up to 10 times as much for the same storage capacity. In addition, ATTO announced at the same time a MacOSX only dual-channel fibre channel SCSI card."

2 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. yes its a bargain! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    No you cannot buy an equivalent system for less.

    does your equivalent system hav dual, redundant power supplies, dual controllers? dual ethernet? dual fiber channel? independent masters on all the disks? fit in 3-U, have hot swap? Web browser based administration? have a 3 year 4 hour response time warntee? have an available replacemt kit for all the parts? have legendary apple quality?

    then there is the cost of installation and maintainence. does your system come out of the box, plug it in and spend less than ten minutes to configure it to run samba, nfs, appleshare, apache, LDAP, DNS, Netboot server, mailserver over a dual ethernet gigbit interface? with an unlimited client lic?

    I'll answer for you. NO.

  2. Re:I wonder by fhammond · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It might be useful for people doing SD or even HD editing on the Mac. There are plenty of third-party RAID solutions for the Mac but for this market (i.e. it's gotta work, Apple has to support it and we don't care if it's expensive), the Xserve RAID would be very appealing.

    http://www.lafcpug.org/review_xserve_raid.html

    According to Apple, a maxed-out Xserve RAID can support an HD 1080i stream. That would be quite a thing to see. I wonder how loud this thing is? You'd hope that Apple would have predicted it'd be used by people with a G4 on their desk, not just by people with an Xserve in their data center.